Since Mildred’s husband, Dr. LeRoy Boyd, had taught aeronautical engineering at OU until his retirement some years ago, Jack had every confidence in his abilities to work the new PA system. He also knew darn well that if he got up on a stage with Sapulpa’s mayor, the high school glee club, the reigning Mrs. Oklahoma, and every local politician up for reelection this coming November, he’d be stuck there for an hour or more.
“I’ll pass, Mildred,” he said easily. “I’m just here to enjoy myself tonight.”
Her lively black eyes cut to Sabrina. “So I see, boy. So I see.”
Thankfully, a harried committee member claimed the mayor’s attention at that moment. Jack made a quick escape with Sabrina before they were both put to work solving whatever crisis was at hand.
“I’ll call Mildred and get you out of working that rally if you want,” he offered. “Just because she lives, breathes and eats projects like that, she thinks everyone else should, too.”
“So I noticed,” Sabrina replied, laughing. “Actually, I think I’d enjoy it.” Her face tipped to his, the smile still in place. “And just for the record, I don’t need you to get me out of the project if I didn’t want to do it. I can fight my own battles, Jack.”
“I’ll remember that.”
The easy response sent a tiny thrill down Sabrina’s spine. For the second time in less than an hour, a hazy image of the future teased at the edges of her mind. A future that possibly, just possibly, included Jack Wentworth. Firmly, she reined in her skittering thoughts. The future would take care of itself. Tonight, she simply intended to enjoy the festival...and Jack.
She soon discovered that the mayor wasn’t the only person in Sapulpa who knew her escort. Although he insisted on keeping a low profile, a number of the festival organizers went out of their way to thank him for his continuing support. At one point, the director of the local nursing home grabbed his arm and broke down in tears when she described the new TVs and computerized medicine dispensing system bought with a grant from Wentworth Oil. Gallantly, Jack passed her his handkerchief, then steered Sabrina toward some picnic tables set up under a spreading oak tree.
“I don’t know about you,” he muttered, “but I need a beer.”
“Sounds good to me.”
As they neared the tables, the scent of simmering barbecue evoked a loud rumbling from the vicinity of Sabrina’s middle.
“How about a beer and some ribs?” Jack amended with a lift of one brow.
“Sounds even better.”
After feasting on beans, cole slaw and baby back ribs so succulent that the blackened meat dropped off the bone in big chunks, they nursed a couple of long-necks through most of the speechifying. Later, they wandered through the art displays set up in the high school auditorium. Sculpture, wood carving, pottery, photography and paintings in every medium vied for attention in the juried displays.
Sabrina exclaimed over a small set of watercolors of old Route 66 roadside attractions, but refused Jack’s offer to purchase them for her. He did convince her to accept a whimsical print of the Catoosa whale, however. She agreed only because all proceeds from the sale of the print went to the preservation of the two-story blue behemoth, an icon of the days when tacky attractions like rattlesnake farms and trading posts and gen-u-ine teepee motor courts stretched all along Route 66.
In return, Sabrina cajoled Jack into posing with her in front of a cardboard cutout of a sixties era twosome speeding along the famous Mother Road. After a token protest, Jack agreed. Two minutes later, the photographer slid the Polaroid shots into cardboard holders preprinted with the date and the event, then handed one to each of them. Grinning, Sabrina paid for the pictures, handed him one copy, and added hers to the rolled-up whale print sticking out of her shoulder bag.
By the time they exited the auditorium, the sun shimmered just above the horizon and the slow, seductive strains of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” drifted from the roped off area on Main Street.
“Now that’s a song I recognize,” Jack said. “Care to risk serious damage to your sandals, not to mention your bare toes, by dancing with me, Ms. Jensen?”
“I’ve got tough toes, Mr. Wentworth. It would be my pleasure.”
Sabrina didn’t realize the truth of that sentiment until they joined the throng of slow-moving dancers and Jack’s arm slid around her waist. Dancing with him generated more than mere pleasure. Her pulse caught, then sped off when he brought her close against him. Small sparks ignited every time his breath brushed her temple. To Sabrina’s canstemation, his body also raised ripples of pure sensation everywhere it contacted hers.
She might have made it through the slow, dreamy number in one piece, though, if Jack’s hand hadn’t roamed from her waist to the bare skin of her back. Every nerve in her body leaped at his touch. Her throat went tight and dry. Her head came back, and her gaze met his.
Jack was still trying to handle the sensations roused by the feel of Sabrina’s warm flesh under his fingertips when she leaned back a bit. Her green eyes shimmered, and he could no more resist licking the tiny spot of tangy sauce from the corner of her lips than he could stop the moon from glowing where it peeked above the storefronts.
A lick wasn’t enough, of course. He had to have another taste. His mouth covered hers in a light, lingering kiss. Despite the deliberate casualness of the touch, white lightning streaked from his groin to his gut, then shot straight to his brain.
Jack raised his head, breathing hard. For a moment, his nerves snapped like an exposed electrical wire. Every muscle in his body tensed with the need to crush her against him before reality came crashing in.
What in God’s name was he doing?
Yesterday, he’d been pumping pure adrenaline from the brawl outside the diner. The kiss he’d stolen from Sabrina had kept him awake longer than he wanted to admit last night. But this instant, electrical response to her taste and her feel shocked him.
Dammit, hadn’t he learned his lesson with Heather? He’d better back off, and quickly, before things went too far, too fast for either of them. Reluctantly, he disengaged. Not enough to release her. Just enough to put some breathing space between them.
“I’m sorry.”
She didn’t make any effort to hide her surprise.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said with a small, rueful smile.
“Why not?”
He was starting to get used to her directness.
“I told you last night I wasn’t Looking for more than a few hours spent in the company of an intriguing woman.”
Her chin went up a degree or two. “That’s right, you did.”
“I don’t want you to think I was blowing hot air through my hat, Sabrina, or that I’m trying to push you.”
“I don’t push easy.”
Too late, he saw that he’d scratched her pride. Again! With a look that would strip the threads from a rusty pipe, she pulled out of his arms.
“I guess I didn’t make myself clear last night. I’m not interested in anything serious at this point in my life, either.”
She turned away. Jack was still kicking himself for his clumsiness when he caught her low mutter.
“Especially not with a too handsome playboy whose ego is apparently a whole lot bigger than his granddaddy’s stock portfolio.”
He tried valiantly to recover, but the air between them remained cool until he drove Sabrina home a few hours later.
She didn’t invite him in.
Chapter 6
Keeping an eye on the thinning Tuesday morning breakfast crowd, Sabrina leaned her shoulders against the wall of the diner’s steamy kitchen and twisted a limp strand of hair around her forefinger.
“I’m fine, Rachel. Honestly.”
Her twin snorted into the phone. “You don’t sound fine. You sound like you’re running yourself into the ground with work and school and that ridiculous schedule you’ve set for yourself to buy the diner.”
“It’s not ridiculous. If I swing the s
mall business loan I’ve applied for, I can take over from Hank at the first of the year.”
Rachel didn’t respond, but Sabrina read her thoughts as clearly as if they were face to face. The sisters didn’t talk to each other every day. They didn’t need to. With the uncanny telepathy of twins, they communicated over long distances and extended time periods without words.
Right now, Sabrina knew, her sister was biting her lip. Rachel didn’t share her sister’s need for stability. Content to flit from job to job the same way she flitted from man to man, Rachel had inherited their father’s optimistic outlook on life and their mother’s inability or unwillingness to settle down. Sabrina worried about her constantly and, at moments like this, envied her.
“Why don’t you come down to Oklahoma City this weekend?” her twin suggested. “We’ll go skinny-dipping in the pool here at the apartments, like we did that night daddy left us at the motel to go next door and have a beer.”
“We were seven years old then.”
“So?”
“So I think twice about baring my behind in public these days. So should you. As best I recall, those jeans you borrowed from me stretched a bit tight across the rear.”
“Buck likes them that way,” Rachel purred.
“Buck?”
“The new guitarist at In Cahoots. Remember, I told you about him? Big, brawny and sooo—”
“Beautiful. Yes, I remember.”
Smiling, Sabrina listened while her twin gave a quick update on her campaign to make the newest band member her love slave. Rachel estimated that it would take another week of sashaying past and leaning over to take orders at the noisy, cavernous country-western saloon and dance hall where she tended bar. Sabrina gave the hapless Buck another night—two at most.
“What about you?” Rachel probed. “Anything happening with that rigger you told me about?”
Sabrina hesitated. Her sister had called the diner just after Jack and his friend, Al, had left last week. Convinced at the time that the mighty Jack Wentworth had been playing games with her, Sabrina had told Rachel only that there had been a brawl and that a certain long-legged rigger had promised to come back later. She hadn’t spoken to her sister since that call.
Nor had she spoken to Jack in the past three and a half days...not that she was counting.
“No,” she answered with a mental shrug, “nothing’s happening.”
“Didn’t he come back to the diner?”
“He did, but...”
“But you torched him,” Rachel finished on a note of disgust. “Come on, Sabrina, admit it. Every time some guy gets too close to you or acts like he might interfere with that almighty schedule you’ve set for yourself, you push him away.”
Sabrina wasn’t ready to admit anything, especially the fact that she hadn’t exactly pushed Jack away. She wasn’t sure why she hesitated to talk about Jack Wentworth to her inquisitive sister, or even share his name. She was still too confused by her reaction to the man—and by his abrupt withdrawal the night of the Blowout—to discuss him at all, even with her twin.
“Look who’s talking,” she joked instead. “The minute ol’ Buck shows the first signs of real interest, you’ll cut him off at the knees.”
“I’m just not ready to settle down. You, on the other hand, are too settled. You need to shake it up a bit. Let yourself go. Buy something short and slithery and outrageous—”
“So you can borrow it”
“...and have yourself a fling or two before you start building your empire of diners,” Rachel concluded, ignoring her sister’s dry interjection.
“Hey, I’m not exactly withering on the vine, you know. I’ve had a fling or two in my time.”
“Ha! Those boys don’t count. You need a man, twin. A real man. One who’ll sweep you off your feet and rattle your bones and make you forget how to breathe.”
That came too darn close to the mark for Sabnna’s comfort. Tucking the limp strand into the twist at the back of her head, she pushed away from the wall.
“We’ll continue this fascinating discussion some other time, okay? Hank’s just come in, and I want to talk to him about restoring the old neon sign over the front door.”
“If you put as much effort into your love life as you do into your studies and that diner,” her twin groused, “you’d...”
“I have to go. Talk to you soon.”
Hanging up on her indignant sister, Sabrina cornered Hank in the tiny room at the back of the diner that served as a combination storeroom and office. Her first week at the diner, she’d rolled up her sleeves, waded in, and arranged the jumble of cans, boxes and sacks into reasonable order. In the months since, Hank had gradually turned over more and more of the inventory and bookkeeping tasks to Sabrina. She’d learned to account for his habit of dipping into the till whenever someone needed more than just a free meal. She’d even coaxed him into keeping an inventory sheet of sorts to save extra trips to their wholesale supplier. She hadn’t quite convinced him to go along with her latest project, however—restoring the double-sided neon sign over the diner’s front entrance.
Hank insisted that the peeling paint and blacked-out letters gave the place an air of authenticity, but Sabrina winced every time she pulled into the parking lot. With everything else that had needed fixing at the diner, she’d put the sign on the back burner. A peek at the prices of the neon art at the Blowout on Friday night, however, had convinced her that prices were only going to go up. She’d done some serious pencil pushing over the weekend. A few earnest phone calls yesterday had reworked the investment necessary to restore the sign to its original glory.
“Got a minute, Hank?”
“Maybe.” He eyed her suspiciously and rolled the ever present cigar around in his mouth. “Why?”
Sabrina pulled out the revised sheet of figures she’d worked so hard on. “I called around for more estimates on restoring the sign.”
“Oh, no. Not that again.”
He turned, reaching for one of the five-pound sacks of kidney beans that went into his chili. Sabrina got between him and the beans.
“Just look at the figures. The best estimate I got was fifteen hundred dollars to spray paint the metal and retube the neon.”
“Fifteen hundred!”
“We can save three hundred of that by taking the sign down ourselves and transporting it into Tulsa.”
“That’s still more’n we can afford.”
“It would be,” she agreed, “if our soft drink distributor hadn’t promised to cough up another two hundred.”
“Why the hell did he do that?”
“Because I convinced him that he should pay for the free advertising he’ll get with his product’s logo lit up in our sign,” Sabrina disclosed, her eyes twinkling. “So what do you think? Should we do it?”
He scratched his shiny bald head. “Damn, woman, you’re peskier than a flea at a dog reunion.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“Yes, no, whatever,” Hank grumbled. “You know darn well you’re gonna nag me until I agree, so you might as well do what you want.”
Sabrina suffered a momentary pang of conscience. A thousand dollars was a big investment, even with the sign maker’s agreement to let them pay out the amount in manageable monthly installments.
“I’m sure we’ll recoup the investment within six months. I did a cost benefit analysis using the Reimer statistical curve for advertising.” She smoothed the folded papers with her palms. “Look, if you enter the current customer base here and the minimum expected...”
A sound that was halfway between a wheeze and a chortle burst from Hank.
“Just go for it, Sabrina,” he instructed with a flap of a gnarled hand. “I don’t trust book figures farther than I can spit ‘em, but I trust your instincts.”
She refolded the papers, her smile wide and bright “Good. I asked a couple of our regulars to stop by this afternoon and help me take down the sign... assuming you agreed.”
; Hank didn’t even bother to respond to that.
“If you’ll let me borrow your truck, I’ll drive into Tulsa this afternoon,” she said happily.
Reenergized, she went out front to wipe down the tables. This project was exactly what she needed to push Jack Wentworth out of her mind. Not that he’d occupied it exclusively during the past three and a half days. Just enough to annoy her.
Why in the world should it bother her that he hadn’t called or stopped by, anyway? She hadn’t expected him to. Their Friday night excursion to Sapulpa had started out friendly enough—
Ha! Who was she kidding? Friday night had started out like a dream. Squirting a long arc of cleaner, Sabrina attacked a table. Her nose twitched from the disinfectant as she scrubbed.
She’d enjoyed everything about the first part of the evening, she admitted grudgingly. Right up to and including that dreamy dance and even dreamier kiss. So why had Jack pulled back? And why the heck had she gotten so bent out of shape when he did?
Maybe Rachel was right. Maybe Sabrina did take everything too seriously, including Jack Wentworth. Maybe she shouldn’t worry so much about his agenda. In retrospect, she probably shouldn’t have fired up at him the way she had. What was it he’d said? That he only wanted a few hours of her company?
Well, he got them, she thought. They had some fun, then went their separate ways. No expectations or promises on either side. She slapped her sponge onto a cracked Formica tabletop and tried—again—to convince herself that was exactly the way she wanted it.
By the time her recruits showed up to help take down the sign, Sabrina had scrubbed the tables, the floors and the bathrooms, then worked a busy noon rush. She should have felt drained, but her excitement bubbled like carbonated water as they went to work.
Grunting, her helpers attacked the rusted mounting assembly. One bolt after another came loose with a loud, protesting squeal. The sign loosened, then tipped drunkenly to one side.
The Mercenary and the New Mom Page 7